country, carried them all forward in an ever increasing mass of Irish tradition. Then came the storms and losses, and the Irish memory, adding still to its store, viewed them in a more intense, or bitter, or eloquent mood. Their bards wrote odes, which the people got by heart, on the heroes of their national story-Geraldines, and O'Neills, and O'Donnells; insurgents, and gallant rebel leaders, and even the rapparees of seventeenth century brigandage. The trait became a national possession, infecting even the English and Scottish settlers, and while the nationalists sang and fought as though their headless and quartered leaders were once more alive and in the fray, the Protestant settlers raised memorials to William of Orange, and the unquiet spirits which attended on the whole wild welter of Irish history were evoked as each new occasion for agitation and civil strife occurred. While the Englishman invested his memory in law or passive habit, and the Scotsman selected a few episodes for casual and festive memory, for the Irishman memory became a kind of fury, plaguing both him and his enemies with its ceaseless ministrations.

It is usual to claim for Ireland the note of spiritual interest and deep piety. But before attributing piety to Ireland, and expecting in modern literature some new expression of spiritual power, a little definition is necessary. 'Christianity,' says John Eglinton in his Bards and Saints, 'never learned to express itself in Irish. The "Island of Saints," or Celtic Ireland, is that country which throughout its whole history has never produced a saint, understanding by that word a religious genius.' Allowing for the witty misuse of terms, the paradox is true. For some centuries after the arrival of Patrick the Celtic Church rose to an eminence which more than once seemed to threaten Roman supremacy itself. Its heroes, from Patrick to Columba; its missions, reaching across Europe; its schools, the home of the earliest Renaissance known to Europe; all these combined to form a glorious chapter of Irish history. Yet they did not strike any conventional note, or conform to any one of the recognized modes of spiritual propriety. For once at least in its history, religion, possibly to its loss, became neither greater nor less than life, but life itself. Never did Christian Church so wholeheartedly take

the land and all it held to its heart as Patrick and his men took Ireland. Irish tribal divisions dominated ecclesiastical organization; Druids gave the Christian priests something more elaborate than their pagan tonsure, and under the fostering care of Irish royal families the Celtic Church became a national institution. I am not here concerned with the moral or immoral consequences of the development, but only with the fact that the note of early Irish religion lay in its splendid worldliness, and the lack of separation between spiritual and temporal. Saints like Cellach of Killala shared, as princes, in the feuds, from which not even their orders could free them. Columba struck a bold stroke on behalf of the secular bardshe had too much of the old Adam in him to do otherwise. There is a fine human disorder about the wish recorded of St. Brigit: 'I would like a great lake of ale for the King of the Kings, I would like the people of heaven to be drinking it through eternal ages': and only a primitive and warlike Hebrew psalmist could understand as Irish monks obviously did the true inwardness of ecclesiastical cursing. Nor do the Irish records try to conceal the wayward humanity of their heroes. St. Patrick, according to that authentic history, The Colloquy, had been taken with a great thirst after preaching. 'A drink for Patrick was besought of the host, but in the matter of a draught he denies the saint. The righteous one being angered at the niggard said: "To thee, Maelan, be not born either son or daughter; have thou not relatives, nor yet a single kinsman." Neither had he.' As for Columba, it is the vivacious Irishman, the son of princes, the pugnacious ecclesiastic, as much as the saint, whom the Irish have admired. 'Columcille,' says Keating, with a certain admiring detail, 'caused three battles to be fought in Ireland, to wit, the Battle of Cuil Breimhne, the Battle of Cuil Rathan, and the Battle of Cuil Feadha'; and his curses are not omitted from the tale.

The truth is that Christianity in Ireland came, like the national renascence in Elizabethan England, as a mode of expressing powerful personality and of inspiring literature of unusual promise. It was essentially heretical, but its heresies were those of keen and vivid life, not of the schools. No doubt

the age of inspiration passed. A church, great in itself and great in its services to Ireland, finally dominated Irish religion; but it was too dogmatic, too well-disciplined to let 'the wild Irish' express their religious genius as they desired. To Rome succeeded England, and for three squalid centuries English churchmen and politicians lived off a nation whose true religion they tried, but ineffectually, to crush. Penal laws and failure in education and ghastly misery thwarted the early promise of a great religious future. Yet who that has traced the pilgrim's way to some little holy well among the hills, where the apostolic succession carries the worshippers beyond the Christian era to the dawn of spirit worship; or has caught the fine flavour of older Irish Catholic scholarship, or wondered at modern Irish heretics, losing themselves in mysteries, but never failing to set spirit above matter, will deny that the spiritual genius over which Patrick of the Confession has proved so fitting a patron saint, still exists. Nor have the changes of history radically affected its modes of expression. They say that as the British troops marched to take Delhi from the sepoys an Irish Catholic chaplain gave a general absolution to the men, Protestant and Catholic alike, as Columba might have done. In less militant fashion, there is a wonderful community of childlike spirit between the early hymn

"Jesukin

Lives my little cell within,"

and this little song taken down from a Connacht peasant:

"A fragrant prayer upon the air,

My child taught me:

Awake there, the morn is fair,

The birds sing free.

Now dawns the day; awake and pray,

And bend the knee.

The Lamb who lay beneath the clay

Was slain for thee."

Apart from these intellectual and spiritual characteristics, few lands possess as Ireland does the raw material of literature. Their legendary lore is singularly rich and very Irish. The three great legendary cycles, tales of the gods, tales of

Ulster, and Fenian tales, may lack the form and coherence of classical mythology, but they are rich in every other quality. If their gods evade the modern imagination, their heroes, Cuchulainn, Diarmuid, and Finn, are not unworthy to rank with the Arthurian knights. The story of Deirdre has already passed into the sacred circle of high poetic themes, and the world is not likely to forget Oisin. But the tales have a feature all their own. Unlike most other early peoples, the Irish blended natural beauty with the passions, human and divine, of their gods and heroes; and modern poets have found it easy to relate themselves to a literature as intimately connected with nature as their own. Did not Deirdre sing, as she left Alban, 'My love to thee, O land in the east, and 'tis ill for me to leave thee, for delightful are thy coves and havens, thy kind soft flowery fields, thy pleasant green-sided hills, and little was our need for departing'? They dwelt in a land of pleasant trees, oaks and red-berried rowans; with streams whose pebbles and sands gleamed white through clear water; and there were cheerful sounds of birds; and in its season the noise of hunting was heard on the ancient hills. 'Skittish deer,' sang the Fenian minstrel of Aran, 'are on her pinnacles, soft blackberries on her waving heather; cool water there is in her rivers, and mast upon her russet oaks... A crimson crop grew on her rocks, in all her glades a faultless grass; even her crags afford friendly refuge, leaping went on, and fawns were skipping! Smooth were her level spots-her wild swine, they were fat; cheerful her fields, her nuts hung on her forest-hazel boughs, and there was sailing of long galleys past her. Right pleasant their condition all when the fair weather sets in; under her rivers' brinks trouts lie; the sea-gulls wheeling round her grand cliff answer one the other -at every fitting time delectable is Aran.' Partly because the national bards laid hold on the legends for poetic purposes, the early stories of Ireland have never ceased to influence the Irish mind, and it was from Finn's band that a famous modern anti-English association took its name. That which is valid still in politics has potentialities for literature also.

With the legends, or lying as a kind of detritus round them, there is the rich region of Irish folklore and supersti

tion. The absence of great scientific collectors must not be allowed to conceal the richness of the store. Darkness, and winds, and woods have still their terrors for the peasantry; and many a country girl will shrink from the night where lurk the powers of the unseen world. It is only a few years since an Irish country-side was startled by the activity of a leprechaun. Mr. Yeats describes the ghostly watchers round an Irish village: 'By the cross of Jesus! how shall I go? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on me. If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless one, and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at Hillside gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital Lane'; and in the same collection he tells of the small white square on the limestone cliff of Ben Bulben. "There is no more inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deep considering. It is the door of faery land.' Under normal modern circumstances supernaturalism in literature is an appeal to artifice— something of the second intention. But for the Irish poet, fear of things unseen is still one of the primary emotions; and in his own mind there may lurk beliefs which neither modern philosophy nor modern religion can approve. No doubt the teachings of the Church have tended to blur the old impressions, and the waves of emigration and return have disquieted the peasant mind, but Ireland, in spite of everything, possesses to-day a greater mass of imaginative superstition than any other part of the British islands.

With these beliefs, too, go the folk-tales of which they are the main inspiration. Ireland has not had the good fortune to possess either a Grimm or an Ian Campbell. The distinguished position of Campbell, his relation to his clansmen, and the educated enthusiasm of his interest in Gaelic literature, all went to make his collection of West Highland tales a masterpiece. In Ireland, on the other hand, while enthusiasm has been present, too many elements of confusion have entered into the collection of tales. One is conscious, in Dr. Hyde's Beside the Fire, of a rollicking irresponsible inclination on the part of his informants to give the dash of the Irish tem